“The point is that there are several details about the Race that aren’t mentioned in popular history.”
“Like?”
Mosasa grinned. “Perhaps you know why a spacefaring race trying to contain human expansion didn’t just drop a large asteroid on Earth?”
Wahid didn’t, but Father Mallory, the xenoarchaeology professor, suddenly knew exactly what Mosasa meant. But since that wasn’t true of Fitzpatrick, Mallory remained quiet as he mentally fit all the pieces together.
Mallory knew the reason the Race didn’t bombard Earth was because the Race had evolved several cultural quirks against direct confrontation. Direct aggression was a strict taboo, so dropping a big rock on another planet was unthinkable, no matter how threatened they felt.
That didn’t mean the Race was peaceful. Far from it. The Race was ruthlessly adept at indirect violence, cultural judo where they encouraged enemies to destroy themselves, leaving their own pseudopods free of blood. By the time the Race had a unified government and reached the stars, they had developed sociology, politics, and anthropology into actual sciences,
More important, from a warfare standpoint, they knew how to change outcomes. They could see that if this political party received a large funding stream at the same time this corporation in another country was bought out and factories shut down, the end result would be a civil war in country number three.
The Race had covertly used that expertise to severely undermine the situation on Earth for nearly seventy-five years before they were discovered.
“Hold on.” Wahid interrupted Mosasa’s explanation. “Are you saying that some old Race bogeyman is telling you about ‘political, economic, and scientific anomalies’?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Mosasa answered.
“You have an AI,” Kugara said.
The Race’s warfare relied on artificial intelligence. Not only was it impossible to run their cultural modeling on anything else—even if humans could duplicate the coding—the only way they could fight against the humans in direct confrontation was to have autonomous weapons that could act without direction. The implication of those weapons, which fought long past the end of the war, was one of many reasons that possession of an AI device was still a capital crime in most of human space.
Except on Bakunin, of course.
But it went deeper than that. Everything slid into unnatural clarity for Mallory. With Nickolai’s comment that Mosasa wasn’t human, and that even a cursory search for records showed Mosasa Salvage and Mosasa himself being here for over three centuries, there was only one credible explanation.
Mosasa wasn’t
He
The realization filled Mallory with a moral dread unlike anything he had felt before. He could feel a spiritual eclipse, where the anarchic mass of Bakunin drifted between this small gathering and the light of God, leaving them all in a darkness that was felt rather than seen.
Mallory forced himself to listen to Mosasa explain the details of his expedition. Part of him wanted to leave now, convinced that he sat in the epicenter of something terrifying and godless. Another part, the soldier, the man who was here on a mission for the Church, knew that, if anything, it was God’s providence that had taken him here.
And, in the end, Mallory knew that quitting this job was not something Fitzpatrick would do and would lead to many uncomfortable questions for someone trying to keep a low profile.
That last decision was vindicated when Mosasa introduced the woman who was going to be the military commander for this expedition. When the petite, white-haired woman walked from the shadows of Mosasa’s tach- ship, Mallory made little effort to conceal his shock. It was not an emotion that Fitzpatrick would be hiding right now.
“My name is Vijayanagara Parvi,” she introduced herself, looking at everyone assembled in front of her in turn. With the exception of Nickolai, Mallory noted. When she looked at Mallory, she said, “Some of you already know me.”
